What is the difference between cellular data being used on my phone and cellular data being used on my notebook? Data is data.
What is the difference between cellular data being used on my phone and cellular data being used on my notebook?
The difference is the cellular company’s profits amount.
They had this restriction in the UK where the networks would prevent hotspots from actually working. You had to buy a special additional package.
Restriction has now vanished and there are no such limits on usage. Not sure if the Regulator intervened but it was most certainly a cash grab.
These days they still manage to rip us off by annual contract increases of RPI+3.9%. That applies even during a 2 year contract.
Not sure if the Regulator intervened
It was an EU thing before…well you know what you did
I didn’t ask for this. 😭
I think this is also an archaic model from before smart phones and the early days of smart phones. In the early days of apps, most attempted to limit data usage because most network providers charged a premium for data and the networks were much slower and smaller.
While you could tether in these early days, even before smart phones, the computer was capable of much higher data usage than the phone. These limits were put in place to protect a network that wasn’t really built for this level of load.
Old rules with good purpose turned into a way to charge more money.
Fair enough. That describes the past, but not the present, or the future.
If it’s an android phone, enable dev mode, install adb on your laptop, run an sshd under termux on the phone, and you should be able to set up iptables to forward packets from the laptop through the phone. The phone won’t know that it’s being used for tethering. Although I hadn’t seen the stuff about packet TTL before. Maybe it’s as simple as just adjusting that.
A less complicated method that I used for years:
- Install SimpleSSHD on your phone
- If you’re running Windows, install PuTTY on your PC
- Connect to SimpleSSHD through PuTTY/ssh and set a parameter for dynamic forwarding (CLI option is
-D 8888) - Set your web browser or application to use SOCKS5 proxy at
localhostport8888
It doesn’t redirect all traffic (you’d want to avoid system updates, for example) but might be easier than messing with iptables.
There is an app that can change TTL value through
iptables. It requires root.
Back in the day PDANet was the app to go to enable unlimited tethering.
Still works for me as of last year. Now I use rooted android with ttlfix.
Well that’s because,
fuck you pay methose are special data packets.Ahahaha, are you in marketing?
No, I’m far worse. I studied politics in college.
My condolences.
Data is data in the same way water is water and electricity is electricity; nobody should have the power to dictate how you use it. I really wish we’d enshrine genuine net neutrality and shut this kind of nonsense down.
Except there is not a physical commodity or production at the other end of which they are supplying me a portion of a finite amount. If they “pipe” is big enough to supply what is promised to every end user it is supplied to, the water company or power company can still run out of water or power if one person uses a ridiculous amount. The ISP can’t run out of “data”, they aren’t even supplying it - it comes from a host. The ISP is just responsible for running the cables, or “connecting the pipes”.
The ISPs loves using the comparison to water or power, because you get charged more for using more of either and that is how they have convinced lawmakers (who are so old and out of touch they have no idea how the internet works) that using more data should cost more. They’ve convinced our lawmakers basically that they have a big “tank full of data” and if I use too much, there wont’ be any for my neighbors.
The truth is they are selling me something they can’t provide - a 250Gbps “pipe” that can’t actually supply 250Gbps if everyone they sold it to wants to use it at the same time. They sell the same pipe to the whole neighborhood and blame the neighborhood when they try to use what they were told they bought.
Except there is no ‘unlimited’ for water or electricity.
There used to be
It’s a really weird and very American problem. Our home broadband either doesn’t exist or is really expensive in any given market, and tends to have clauses, conditions, etc. Like Comcrap limiting people to 1TB/mon (very easy to burn through quickly by just watching some television programs) unless they pay more for “unlimited”. People, as taught by Capitalism, hunt for the best deals. Paying one bill instead of two saves money. Some have light enough home Internet requirements that they don’t need expensive home broadband.
Then the companies get pissed that we’re doing what we are supposed to do, find the best deal for our needs, so they set up false gates to make sure we follow the path they want us to follow. Then they pay off the regulatory agencies to allow terms like “unlimited” mean not unlimited, 3G HSPA+ being known as 4G. 4G being known as LTE, 4GLTE or 5Ge. 5G being known as 5G, 5G+, 5GUW, 5GUC, (even though, with the exception of T-Mobile in many markets, that 5G will actually be non-standalone and anchored to an LTE packet core, not 5G SA) and all the other damn arbitrary marketing buzzwords. All of which really mean nothing because the 5G spec allows a carrier to flip on the 5G availability flag on a phone even if 5G doesn’t exist in your market.
Most of this, AT&T is the biggest perpetrator of by far. Especially the lying about 5G.
The rules are all made up, nothing is real. Time for the arbitrary monthly bill increase for no reason! Pay up, chump!
Yep, lack of broadband in this AirBnB I’m staying in is the only reason I was using it as a hotspot in the first place. The speed here is about the speed they’d throttle it at. I kind of had to fork over the $15 or deal with slow internet one way or the other.
It always blows my mind going to a rental and the rental has no or lacking Internet. Yes, I’m probably on vacation, but it’s the future and life requires a few megabits. Years back I made it standard procedure to prep some kind of mobile broadband for my destination (buying a month of prepaid for a hotspot or whatever) fully expecting it to just always suck, it’s annoying that this is still a necessary procedure in 2024.
Unfortunately, I didn’t pick it. My mother is paying. And when I asked my mother if she looked to see on the AirBnB ad if this place had high speed internet, she said, “other ads did, but this one didn’t.” Sigh.
How do they even know if you use your data as a hotspot? That’s just ridiculous!
Makes you wonder what else they know about what you’re doing online.
Monitoring DNS requests to their own servers.
128kbps is only mildly better then dial up lmao
And it’s 60mbps right now. Not amazing, but also manageable. They could cut it down to 10 or something, which would still make downloading huge files or whatever a pain in the ass, but would also still allow you to do basic things like watch Netflix.
Use a VPN. ISP are being disingenuous when they claim a data connection is unlimited at the point of purchase and then slug us with restrictions when we try and use it. If they can detect a tether, the VPN should obscure it.
Start the VPN from the phone though, otherwise the TTL-trick will still work for them.
It’s because at&t also sells home Internet. If you have unlimited hotspot, then you wouldn’t want that sweet sweet DSL or whatever shit Internet ATT sells
They can detect you using your phone as hotspot? Creepy.
Very creepy.
I used to root my phone and then could use the hotspot without my provider knowing.
wHy dOeS aNyOnE nEeD rOoT??? - morons replying to me when I tell them rooting our phones is essential to have FULL control over it.
Some or all major mobile providers outright BAN hotspots in their ToS. However, they don’t enforce the rule as it would be very unpopular.
And we still have pretty much the most expensive cellular data in the EU. The triopoly sucks.
Get Google fi if it’s available. Very consumer friendly. Actually let me rephrase that. More consumer friendly than most other cell providers. But it’s still Google.
At least all the pricing and features are straight forward and they don’t lock any features (like Hotspot) behind paywalls.
Yeah, even using a hotspot internationally it’s the same price, with the same data limits.
And with data-SIMs, it’s possible to share that data with a few other devices, still at no extra cost.
Those features are often overlooked when people ask why it’s more expensive than e.g. Mint.
Yeah. I haven’t used mint, but the apps, account management and overall ease of use and transparency is legendary with Google fi. Those things are also easy to overlook. It’s just so easy and doesn’t get in my way when I want to manage something like all other carriers.
Every time the ATT sales people bug me at stores I tell them what I’m paying and that I get unlimited hotspot and they usually say “oh, you’re good.”
Add to this that Fi actually allows you to add data only SIMS at no cost.
It’s too expensive. Visible is cheaper and unlimited everything, even hot spot, and no soft data cap.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Visible/comments/efsmwg/warning_there_is_a_data_cap/
I know I know, Reddit post. But there is in fact a soft data cap. The guy who made the post was torrenting and received an email for reaching the data abuse threshold.
If you’re using FI, and you set the device your using the phone hotspot for to metered connection you’re not too terribly likely to reach the data cap on pretty much any of the unlimited fi plans. I do this for work.
lol… 30 terabytes?! Okay. I’m sure even Google Fi has a cap like that. Most people would struggle to even come close to that. It’s 30x the cap of even a home internet provider like Comcast, which usually limits you to 1 terabyte. Most people would have a really hard time hitting even that on their mobile.
The other thing to consider is Visible is cheaper than Google FI too. And most people aren’t going to use anywhere near 30 terabytes.
I know this is going to sound like an ad. Visible has unlimited 5G, and 5Mbps* hotspot, for $25/mo. It’s owned by Verizon.
I think companies call that “innovation” these days.
Anything that makes more profits is “innovation.”
If they could profit from rape, they’d do so and call it innovative.
